Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the micropolitical strategies principals use to influence school staffing within an urban school district. Design/methodology/approach: The author used a qualitative case study approach drawing upon 47 semi-structured participant interviews with 25 individual research participants, 80 hours of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to gain insights into how a group of novice principals, all in schools that deployed principles of autonomy as mechanisms for improvement, conceptualized what the authors label "controlled autonomy"--a condition in which school leaders are expected to both make site-based decisions and be accountable…

Purpose: Turning an education reform program into school reality greatly depends on the principal. In certain cases, principals choose to implement reform instructions only partially. The purpose of this paper is to explore school principals' considerations leading to their decisions not to fulfill a national reform's guidelines in a full and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to outline the findings from a small-scale, exploratory, study of principals' instructional leadership practice in Malaysian primary schools. The dimensions and functions of instructional leadership, explicitly explored in this study, are those outlined in the Hallinger and Murphy's (1985) model.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine first-year principals' sense-making about two potentially conflicting demands as they take over low-performing urban schools: the demand to exert control over their teachers' practice, and the need to build their teachers' trust, collegiality, and commitment. Design/methodology/approach: This study…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to do methodological review of the literature on educational leaders and emotions that includes 49 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1992 and 2012. Design/methodology/approach: The work systematically analyzes descriptive information, methods, and designs in these studies, and their…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the leadership practice of an 11-member district team of educators assembled to respond to one of the most comprehensive bullying laws in the nation--the Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law of 2010. This three-year case study provides school leaders and legislators with an in-depth, fine-grained…

Purpose: This study attempts to describe mentors' perceptions of their ethical dilemmas, the derived mentor roles, and the ethical guidelines suggested by mentors, with reference to previous studies exploring the mentors' multifaceted roles. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 60 mentors participated in a two-phase study: the mentors were…